RAISING THE BAR

Life’s too short to struggle with muddy dialogue. Arcam's sound bar brings relief ato ageing ears.

The problem with surround sound systems is that no one walks away from the cinema thinking, ‘God, I loved that bit where James Bond’s footsteps came from behind you.’ Sorry, ponytail-wearing sound engineers, but it’s true.

So the decades and millions tech companies have spent trying to coax us all into parting with vast sums for home surround systems have largely been in vain.

No one cares where James Bond’s footsteps come from – or any film character’s footsteps, for that matter, barring possibly the T-Rex in Jurassic Park.

It hasn’t helped that the various systems designed to bring 3D sound into the home have become increasingly bizarre – with new ‘soundbars’ simulating five-speaker surround using choruses of tiny speakers inside, which supposedly bounce invisible sonic beams around your front room to create a cathedral of sound. These computer‘enhanced’ contraptions actually induce little more than a feeling of unease.

So hi-fi geek Arcam has really ripped up the rulebook with its lumbering, aluminium-backed Arcam Solo bar. Surround-sound geeks will no doubt hiss, ‘blasphemy’. It doesn’t have five main speakers (as cinema systems ‘should’), or dozens of tiny, computer-aided ones. It has two. It’s a stereo, in other words.

This is a sensible move. Arcam has been able to tune it to respond to music (delivered from CD players) and the spoken word, delivered via TV boxes or Blu-rays. The Solo bar amplifies sound, and plays it with a prissy attention to detail, but without ‘improving’ the sound digitally. It’s perfectly possible to listen to Strictly Come Dancing via the Solo bar, and even enjoy it if you’re that way inclined.

It’s like the speakers your TV should have had, but which the engineers couldn’t fit in as the thing is so thin.